Personal blog of Martin Gunnarsson, mostly focused on small hobby projects
Having solved the first and second Advent of Code puzzles in Rockstar , it was only a matter of time before I finished the third one. Hopefully the assignments will be too difficult soon ... Let the letter be gone Put it into the fire Listen to the wind Until it is gone Scream the wind Shatter it into shards The heart is like loneliness Put shards with the heart into the abyss Cast nothing into…
Background The other day I posted my first attempt at coding in Rockstar . After that I couldn't help myself, and continued with the second Advent of Code puzzle. The code Just like the first time, I wrote a little JavaScript implementation first, to make sure my logic was sound, then I implemented it in Rockstar. This time I hit the ground running, and except for a few frustratingly vague error…
Background At Øredev I met my pal Fredrik , who told me about this presentation he had just been to. It was about a fun programming language called Rockstar , which lets you write 80's rock ballad lyrics that compile. Fun! One faithful evening a few weeks later, after the rest of the family had gone to bed, I decided to have a couple of beers and give it a try. The code Since we're approaching…
Two months ago I started collecting my thoughts on commuting by bike , mostly to convince myself to giving it a shot. Being in the middle of the winter, the weather was pretty rough for a period of time after that, but about a month later I rode to work for the first time . The weather was still a bit questionable on that day, with a very strong crosswind, but I went anyway and was thrilled to…
Background Wherever I list posts on this site, e.g. on the Home page and Archive page , I want to display a reasonably long excerpt from the linked post, to give visitors an idea of its content. There seems to be an almost comical variation in what people want from excerpts - how long they should be, whether they should be marked manually or picked out automatically, or entered separately from the…
Background One of the Eleventy customizations I've set up for this site is automatic generation of responsive <picture> tags from images in Markdown posts. I was going to build it myself using the Eleventy Image plugin, but then randomly stumbled upon a plugin for the markdown-it Markdown processor used by Eleventy that did exactly that. It's called markdown-it-eleventy-img and provides the glue…
My bicycle is a silver Skeppshult STC Basic from 2005 or so. I don't remember exactly when I bought it, but I think it was around that time. Skeppshult is a Swedish manufacturer of bicycles founded in 1911. They've been making bicycles at the same location without interruption since then, and they're the only Swedish manufacturer that makes frames in-house. Iron, and later steel, has been very…
Background A while back I convinced myself bicycle commuting was a feasible alternative to driving for me, and started preparing to giving it a go. The plan wasn't to give up driving entirely, but to start going by bike maybe once per week or so, to introduce some much needed exercise into my life. My preparations mostly consisted of some light bicycle maintenance, installing new lights and…
Background The only thing I didn't like about Eleventy when I started using it was that local Markdown links, like /posts/my-post.md wasn't automatically transformed into their rendered URL counterparts, like /posts/my-post/ . Having links pointing to the source files allows you to follow them locally when working with the content, and many Markdown editors can both help autocomplete links as you…
I live 11 km from work, and there are excellent bike paths all the way, yet I commute by car. I've successfully made several small but positive changes to my life in the last few months, and I would like to take on my habit of commuting by car next. I'm not looking to change it completely, but at least soften it up a bit. I have a colleague and a neighbor who frequently commute the same route as…
One day while reading a blog post I noticed the blog had a "Now" page, where the author briefly described what they were up to at the moment. Unfortunately, I can't recall the specific blog, but it did link to Nownownow.com , which is a page by Derek Sivers promoting the concept of the Now page. Two things stuck with me: Derek seemed to be a very interesting person, and as someone with periodic…
Episode 97 of the Hemispheric Views podcast, called Duel of the Defaults, set of quite a trend on the web. In that episode, Martin Feld and Jason Burk compete for the coveted "Mr. Default" title, by comparing the different apps they use, and deciding who is most default (according to arbitrary decisions by judge Andrew Canion ). After this, people started listing their own "default apps", which is…
Background When I moved this blog from Hugo to Eleventy I wanted to set everything up from scratch to be in control . No more massive themes with mysterious features you're afraid to change because you don't know the potential side-effects. That being said, I did look around at different Eleventy starters , like the Eleventy base blog , and took note of a few features to set up myself. Since I was…
Background I've recently written a couple of posts about the different ways I've customized the Eleventy , the static site generator used for this site. In the previous post I described modifying the HTML rendered by Eleventy to maintain working internal links between Markdown files. This modification makes Eleventy treat local links the way I believe it should by default. Next on my improvement…
Background This is the second post detailing the different customizations I've implemented in Eleventy for this site. In the first post I briefly described setting up code syntax highlighting , which primarily involved installing and configuring an existing plugin. Another tweak I really enjoy is the way links are handled, and for that I had to write some code off my own! I've actually customized…
Background This site is built using Eleventy , a very nice little static site generator. I've previously written a post about how and why I ended up using it , but that mostly covers how to get up and running with generic content. This is the first post in a little series outlining the different customizations I've made in order for Eleventy to produce just the result I want. Syntax highlighting…
Background In the olden days, I had a completely custom site written in classic ASP and kept it up for many years, until social media platforms became my primary outlet for sharing thoughs online. I still built the occasional website for various endeavors, but moved gradually to more ready-made systems like Wordpress and Tumblr . It had been a very long time since I last had a personal website…
In the world of microcontrollers, a fuse is not only a hardware device that protects circuitry from electrical overload, it's also a concept of low-level configuration settings stored in non-volatile memory. These fuses are typically used to set hardware configuration parameters like clock sources and boot sequences, things that are essential when initializing the microcontroller. Once set, these…
Background The clock speed of the ATtiny85 can be set using one of several internal clock sources, or an external one (like a crystal oscillator) for full flexibility. The default setting utilizes the internal 8 MHz oscillator combined with a clock divider of 8, resulting in a 1 MHz clock speed. This clock divider can be disabled to run at the native 8 MHz. Additionally, there's another clock…
Background The ATtiny85 is part of the ATtiny family of microcontrollers, originally from Atmel, now Microchip Technology. It is very small, with only eight pins, six of which are available for I/O. Despite its limitations, it's surprisingly accessible to beginners (myself included) thanks to its compatibility with the Arduino IDE . The ATtiny85 lacks many features that make "real" Arduinos so…